Subversion + TortoiseSVN = AWESOME SCM solution.
Ok, so belay my last message about running Subversion along side of CVS. I don't need to. Subversion is working PERFECTLY.
I spent yesterday setting things up… and all I can say is OMG. I have never been so impressed with how quickly everything snapped together as it relates to developer tools.
TortoiseSVN has made all the difference. It is just amazing. It has such slick integration directly into explorer its not even funny. Here is a screen shot of one of my C# code trees checked out of my Subversion repository:
[screen shot removed]
With shell extensions turned on it gives an awesome icon overlay to immediately tell me if a file is out of sync, needs to be checked in etc. As you can see in that shot, Dacl.cs has been altered and needs to be checked in. A simple right click on it and hit “Commit” will do that. Or I could step out a directory or two, and it will recursively find which files need to be checked in, and do it for me.
It uses SSH2 and tunnels nice and cleanly through just about everything. The only issue I still need to resolve is how to get the client to use my ssh keys so I don't have to enter my password on every action. It seems to prompt me twice each time I take an action, and thats a bit annoying at times. Apparently its just a config option to get the TortoiseSVNPlink ssh agent to work… I just haven't gotten around to figuring that out yet.
The Tortoise Merge and Diff utils work great. I have already used it last night to do some compares, and it “just worked” for me. I like it when I don't have to think and the tool does exactly what they are supposed to do without me having to fuss with it.
I am running Subversion in standalone server mode, and NOT through Apache. I prefer to use the rule of separation for such tasks and I was able to do that nicely, configuring it to work as an unprivileged user with no access except to the source code repo. Here are the steps I took to basically get things going on the Linux side of things (using Debian as my base):
- apt-get install subversion
- adduser svn
- mkdir /var/svn
- svnadmin create /var/svn (Creates the initial repository. I spent more time figuring out how to do that then anything else)
- chown -R svn.devteam /var/svn (devteam is my corporate developer group on the server)
- chmod 775 /var/svn
- cd /var/svn
- chmod g+w db (group needs write access to the repo)
- chmod g+w locks (group needs write access to the file locks)
- cd db
- chmod 440 * (no one outside of svn and the dev team should be touching these files anyways)
- cd ../locks
- chmod 440 * (no one outside of svn and the dev team should be touching these files anyways)
- su svn
- crontab -e
- When in crontab add this: @reboot svnserve -t -r /var/svn
- 😡 (or whatever your save and exit key sequence is)
- svnserve -t -r /var/svn (Need to start it for the first time, since it would seem silly to reboot at this point)
- exit
- vi /etc/password and change the shell from /bin/bash to /bin/false for the svn user
Thats it. At that point I have Subversion running as user svn, with the local repo stored in /var/svn, accessable using SSH tunneling for the development group.
To access it with TortoiseSVN I just do a checkout via a right click and then type: svn+ssh://dana@vulscan.com/ProjectTakeOverTheWorld/ and go to town coding my Pinky and the Brain Mind Altering Operating System. (Better knowns as PATBMAOS, or Longhorn for short)
I still have to get used to how Subversion works, and I could have done a better job by reading their docs BEFORE importing all my code. I wish I would have known to use their format of repository/project/trunk, repository/project/branches and repository/project/tags for the dir structure. Not sure how that will muck up my branches and tags. Will have to wait and see.
So, end result? I would sum it up as:
- I have a completely integrated SCM solution working on my Windows dev machine that…
- … has its client completely integrated into Explorer,
- … with the server working on our existing Linux architecture with very little resource overhead,
- … which tunnels over SSH,
- … works similar to CVS,
- … but doesn't leave file crud in my master sources like CVS,
- … can be easily sandboxed and does NOT require external servers (ie webservers, although it can if you want)
- … was extremely easy to learn to use, with almost no learning curve past normal SCM operations
- … cost me NOTHING for the software, and implimentation costs were less than an hour
If you look back at my original requirements it met every need except for direct access to Visual Studio. And I am ok with that. To be honest, I am HAPPIER with it working directly in Explorer. Since most of my code is driven through kernelmode development using the DDK, I would have had to use the client outside of Visual Studio most of the time anyways. By using the same explorer window for both my VS based code and my DDK based code, I have a seamless and exactly same process for any code I work on.
So there you have it. Subversion + TortoiseSVN = My SCM solution. And I am quite happy with how it turned out. [Dana Epp's ramblings at the Sanctuary]